LinkedIn has become the latest social networking site to decide that new features can be added and switched on by default, and users don’t have to be notified.
The feature allows LinkedIn to use profile information like names and photos in third-party advertising, and seems to have been first noticed by blogger Steve Woodruff …

Re: Old News

@Martin Chandler

It's entirely *your* fault that El Reg is publishing "old news" - you could have emailed the Social Networking Privacy Violation Desk the link when Greg published it, and then it would have been reported at the time, and those of us who don't subscribe to Greg's blog would have known about it in July.

Found it

I have to admit I bumped into the new settings a few days ago. I didn't think much about it at the time, apart from automatically unticking all the permission boxes. I didn't think to check back through the stuff they send occasionally to see if it was actually announced, but I guess I wouldn't have found anything if I had.

Don't leave, just complain

There's a send feedback link in the footer - I'd imagine that if everyone sent a quick message along the lines of "stop it you bastards" and they were flooded, they might be persuaded to change their ways, else perhaps go the way of MySpace.

I wonder how many people (apart from spammy recruitment agents) actually find LinkedIn useful. Until today I hadn't logged in for ages.

YES! LET THEM KNOW!!

I just sent them 6-7 of these and strongly encourage everyone else to do so as well.

I am also spending the next day or two and cutting and pasting ALL of my contacts data (photo, email, past work, recommendations etc) so that if they do keep this shit up I actually CAN follow through on threat to delete all data and never come back. LinkedIn is ONLY site like this I use because it was free, provided some material benefit (ease of use) and most importantly THEY DIDN'T DO THIS FACEBOOK SHIT.

Copy your contacts out (good idea to have backup of these anyways in case they go evil or bust someday) and send them a nastygram and maybe it wont happen again. Make sure you express that a SINGLE repeat of this kind of action will result in your total ban of their service

I've just turned off...

"Manage Social Advertising" and "Enhanced advertising" on the Account tab. Then I discovered "Turn on/off data sharing with 3rd party applications" on the Groups, Companies & Applications tab - turned that off too.

When will they learn...

(and when will we learn to take more notice of changing T's & C's on these sites?)

thanks etc

Thanks for the tip- have just changed my setting accordingly. While doing it I received the somewhat ironic info that IE "blocked this website from displaying content with security certificate errors" ... linkedin should get their own house in order.

Cheers for the heads-up

Different audience

If LinkedIn want to go all Facebook on us with respect to privacy, they could do well to remember that the average LinkedIn user is a great deal more likely to pay attention to and care about this sort of thing.

It's not a population of bored teens who are perfectly OK with posting every intimate detail of what they do and where they go.

now what about their silly group moderation?

For some unfathomable reason LinkedIn have made it possible for the originator of a discussion or a moderator to not only delete individual posts and entire discussions, but to do so without any trace - no date-stamp, no imprint of who deleted it, or why.

This breeds a toxic culture of censorship that if left in place will eventually kill the beast.

Maybe it's because they are such young'uns and never saw the grand flamewars of Undernet and Efnet

Hah

Sneaky Linked IN

Thanks Mate. I never would've known if you hadn't pointed this out to all of us. I've since disabled that feature and will be watching LinkedIN as much as I do Facebook for any silent bait and switch tricks.

Fake LinkedIn Account

For the purposes of experimentation I set up a fake linkedin account with some obvious dubious details and fictional companies. Since then I've had several people, previously unkown to me, requesting I add them as contact. I've obliged them and added them in, though I'm still puzzled why they'd want to be connected to a "Rent Boy". Perhaps their friends will understand.

Reactions to Linked-In

My solution was to simply dump the account., because of the way it seemed to be "jerking me around", without knowing about all the things reported here. It wasn't an easy thing to do, because so many people I actually respected were 'linked-in', but when others began showing up that I hadn't consented to or actually didn't like, it was easy to get rid of and be glad of having done it. This is not an advocacy of boycotting, but rather an expression of preference for many other pathways such as Google+ that seem to make Linked-In look like a pathetic dead-end.